Fashion Folks Learn of Osama Bin Laden's Death via @dkny

Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.

Grid View

Expand

• A poorly-timed promotion from Lady Gaga last night

Last night, as our Twitter feed began to fill up with news about the death of Osama Bin Laden, one particularly bizarre theme began to emerge: People announcing that they'd heard the news from @dkny. Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, first Tweeted that Osama had been killed around 9:45pm. @dkny's announcement came a little over an hour later—fast enough, on a slow-moving Sunday night, that she reached plenty of followers before the official news media did. (Of course, her source was pretty official—she says she found out from watching Fox News.)

Marketing professional Whitney Benjamin responded shortly thereafter with a Tweet saying, "May or may not have just gotten an email asking if talking about Osama is 'off brand'. Not sure how to answer this one... @dkny thoughts?" She can't be the only social media strategist asking herself that question. Plenty of Twitter accounts for brands rolled out off-topic scheduled tweets last night—see Lady Gaga, for example—and it made them all look clueless in the context of such major news. But do people really want to get this kind of information from a fashion label? And, at the risk of sounding crass, does it really help sell clothes?
· Bergdorf, DKNY Chat with the Bronx Zoo's Runaway Cobra on Twitter [Racked NY]
· Meet the Woman Behind Bergdorf Goodman's Hyper-Friendly Twitter [Racked NY]
· @dkny [Twitter]